isible in her eyes.

"My mother was indeed French, but my father was an American soldier,"
she said rapidly, as if eager to have the explanation ended. "You
never asked my name, save that one night when we first met amid the
sand, and then I gave you only that by which I have been most widely
known. None except my father ever called me Elsa; to all others I was
always Toinette. But I am Roger Matherson's only child."

It was clear enough now, and the deception had been entirely my own,
rendered possible by strange chances of omission, by rare negligence of
speech--aided by my earlier impression that she whom I sought was a
mere child.

"And 't was Sister Celeste who told you whom I sought?" I asked, for
lack of courage to say more.

"Yes, to-night, while we waited for you beside the ruins of the old
factory. Oh, how far away it all seems now!" and she pointed backward
across the voters. "Poor, poor girl! Poor Captain de Croix! Oh, it
is all so sad, so unutterably sad to me! I knew them both so well,
Monsieur," and she rested her bowed head upon one hand, staring out
into the night, and speaking almost as if to herself alone; "yet I
never dreamed that he was a nobleman of France, or that he had married
Marie Faneuf. She was so sweet a girl then,--and now to be buried
alive in that wilderness! Think you that he truly loved her?"

"I almost have faith that he did, Mademoiselle," I answered gravely.
"He was greatly changed from his first sight of her face, though he was
a difficult man to gauge in such matters. There was a time when I
believed him in love with you."

She tossed her head.

"Nay," she answered, "he merely thought he was, because he found me
hard to understand and difficult of conquest; but 't was little more
than his own vanity that drew him hither. I trust it may be the deeper
feeling that has taken him back now in face of death to Marie."

"You have indeed proved hard to understand by more than one," I
ventured, for in spite of her graciousness the old wound rankled. "It
has puzzled me much to understand how you so gaily sent me forth to a
mission that might mean death, to save this Captain de Croix."

It was a foolish speech, and she met it bravely, with heightened color
and a flash of dark eyes.

"'T was no more than the sudden whim of a girl," she answered quickly,
"and regretted before you were out of sight. Nor did I dream you would
meet my conditions by such a sacrifice."